Don’t forget spellhance also becomes a thing in wrath. Although shaman still have the AP → SD conversion talent it remains a 1 to .3 conversion while the amount of AP a shaman will have will be significantly reduced compared to TBC because of the loss of str to 2 AP.
The shaman damage profile significantly changes in wrath as well. Your new sources and how they scale are:
- Auto attack - AP
- Windfury (main hand) - AP
- Stormstrike - AP
- Lavalash - AP
- Feral Spirit - AP
- Flametounge (off hand) - SD
- Searing/Magma totem - SD
- Fire Nova - SD
- Lightning Shield - SD
- Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning - SD
- Flame Shock - SD
- Earth Shock - SD
Also note that the Stormstrike debuff can’t be eaten by other players and is increased to 4 charges from 2. This causes Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lightning Shield, and Earth Shock to scale vary well. A huge portion of your damage will be spell damage based which leads to the swapping of certain pieces of gear out for SD instead of AP. Also remember that crit, hit, and haste stats are universal in wrath.
Many shaman will be running with a SD offhand (if you can find one), cloak, weapon enchant, and possibly other easily interchangeable slots. SD trinkets will often be better damage than AP equivalents until ToC or ICC. This also greatly reduces the value of ArmPen for shaman which causes the physical side of our damage to lack late game scaling as well.